Review // INVASION USA - Reagan-era fever dream

I've seen Invasion USA at least a dozen times since I was a kid, and yet it never fails to shock me. It's as bad, nonsensical (really, really nonsensical), cheesy and cheap as any other Chuck Norris movie of the period (or say, ever), but it has a viciousness and an almost lucid, nightmare logic that distinguishes it as a particularly interesting piece of cold-war fear-mongering that has unsettling reverberations in our post-9/11 world. Invasion USA is about wholesale terrorism, unrestrained and impossible to rationalize or predict (for anyone except Norris himself who begins showing up to thwart each attack with no explanation of how he got there). As a result, it becomes accidentally meaningful in the same way 1999's unsettling The Siege did after the fall of the Twin Towers. Both are movies that could likely never be made again and for the same reason-they cut too close to the bone, dramatizing (in the case of The Siege) and fantasizing (in the case of Invasion USA) America's underlying xenophobia and terrorism fixation. Invasion USA is also useful as a barometer for how much culture has changed in the 25 odd years since its release, with our climate of political correctness showing the film's simplistic and blatant hatred for the "other" to be both shocking and comical.

While some of his action movie peers occasionally made inadvertently political statements, Chuck Norris was always overtly political. His films were the action-movie equivalent of "message" films, and his messages were always bluntly stated, simplistically patriotic and of course violent. He was (and still is) a hard-right activist of sorts, using his movies to proffer an isolationist, pro-gun, love-it-or-leave-it vision for America, always with himself as its soft-spoken, roundhouse-kicking savior. From the Missing In Action films, to Delta Force and perhaps most transparently with Invasion USA, Norris, who often wrote the screenplays, used his movies as both vehicles for his own inflated ego, as well as vessels for his heated, rhetoric-fueled political views. As a result, Invasion USA plays like a Reagan-era fever dream with Russian thugs storming the beaches of Daytona and bazooka-ing families in their suburban homes as they trim their Christmas trees. In one scene, these godless communist dogs start shooting up a mall, that holiest of ground for capitalist freedom-lovers.

Obvious comparisons can be made between this film and Red Dawn, which similarly had a large scale Russian invasion of America. But from what I remember, Red Dawn featured a perspective on the conflict, that of youth trading their MTV-era frivolity for grim patriotic duty. But Invasion USA is unmoored from such grounding subtext. Chuck Norris' double-uzi wielding hero is as unknowable as the Russian terrorists who for some reason choose Florida as ground zero for their invasion. In fact, the Russian baddies actually have more lines and screen time than Norris, who ends up feeling like an avenging spirit who simply materializes out of thin air wherever evil decides to show its face (he also never changes out of his Canadian Tuxedo the entire time).

Invasion USA is really a political exploitation film that shows some of the worst the 80's had to offer in terms of unrestrained and callous violence. It's the type of movie that Republicans of the day would've held up as evidence of Hollywood's assault on the morals of the country, except it's message of fear hewed so closely to their own that it practically feels like state propaganda juiced up with thousands of blood squibs. It's warning of Russian terrorist waves breaking on American shores was probably topical enough to tap into the anxieties for the day, providing a little extra context for action crowds with low enough standards to be Chuck Norris fans. In 2011, Invasion USA looks almost quaint compared to our current global fears and Islam-aphobia. And yet if someone made almost the exact same movie, subbing in Muslims for cold-war Russians, it would likely cause all manner of hell to break loose, with political pundits and interest groups gnashing their teeth at each other across cable news desks.

As an action movie, Invasion USA is a fucking hoot. As a time capsule, it reveals some often forgotten qualities of the 1980's, an era we tend to associate more with neon and spandex than nuclear fear and cold war paranoia. What's even more interesting is how much Invasion USA shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Review // PREDATORS - Toothless hunters and bland prey. Also, I'm a grown-up now.

Predators showed me that despite all other evidence to the contrary, I am in fact maturing. You'd think this would be obvious enough without the help of a cynical cash-in sequel/prequel, retread/reboot. I mean, I'm now 32 and a husband and father. But lately I'd been wondering if I was ever going to grow up. Stacks of comic books and video games are piled in my living room. I still treat the acquiring of a back issue or sophomore record with the same obsessive focus as I did with movie posters or laserdiscs in my youth. In many ways I'm still the kid who poured over the Consumers Digest toy catalogue, circling coveted items and making ordered lists of toys I hoped to one day possess. I look around at guys my age, friends and acquaintances, and I see pretty much the same thing. None of us really recovered from the pop culture that blew our pre-adolescent minds, and like addicts, we seem to be perpetually chasing the T-1000 (insert whatever nerdy pop culture reference applies to you).

I don't know if this is good or bad. No wait, I'm actually pretty sure it's bad.

When I saw the trailer for Predators, I received a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe I was going to become an adult after all. Why? Because I didn't give a fuck. At all. And while this may not be a shocking revelation for most, its a BIG DEAL for me. The original Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of those childhood obsessions I was talking about above. I was already mad about all things Arnold, so when Predator came out (Arnold vs. an alien!) and it was PG-14, meaning I could actually see it in the theatre, I was bouncing off the walls. Seeing it for the first time (the first of many) in a darkened theatre all the way back in 1987 is one of my fondest memories from my childhood. It was the Saturday that my public school was putting on the Summer Fair, a day of games, baked goods, prizes and the ever-popular "cherry picker" ride on a fire truck crane. The plan was to attend the fair and then hit an afternoon show. Naturally my best friend Andrew Palkovic and I came prepared. We spent the day at the school fair dressed in head-to-toe camouflage fatigues, our faces painted with the same commando black stripes that Arnold sports on the poster, and carrying our arsenal of plastic machine guns. The fair was fun and all, but we were counting the minutes until show time.

At the appointed time, Andrew and his mother, Betty and our other other friend, Andrew Mitchell took to the Canada Square theatre to line up for the afternoon show. The appearance of 3 public school commandos in full military fatigues, armed to the teeth and standing steely-eyed and stony (we were all three of us acting the part of Arnold) seemed to really entertain the adults waiting in line. They gave us "thumbs up" and tittered as we checked and re-checked that our plastic bullet magazines were full of invisible ammunition. Naturally Predator rocked our fucking world. Betty was a little concerned that for all my pre-show enthusiasm and Arnold fervor, I wasn't quite ready for PG-14 movies on the big-screen due to my curling up into her lap during the scene where Arnold and his team uncover the skinned and hanging bodies of a chopper crew. But I quickly bounced back from that momentary blip of genuine fear once the action-shit hit the action-fan and Arnold chased that "ugly motherfucker" alien straight into the jungles of my heart.

So if you can't already tell, Predator means a great deal to me. Predators was bio-engineered in a lab to exploit the Predator-y emotions of 80's action movie fans like me. It's a new, bad strain of an old drug mixed by retarded chemists who confused their compound volumes. It's a concoction that packs absolutely no punch for experienced users and has little hope of hooking in those that haven't already had their brains fried by the original. In fact, Predators is so bland and boring it causes the initiated to momentarily ponder what they ever found cool about the franchise's premise in the first place. The sum total of Predators innovation is to add the letter "s" to the title. That's right, while Predator managed to please with only one big game hunting extraterrestrial, Predators bores you to tears with scores of them.

From the opening frames, things don't look so dire though, in fact it shows promise. To say the film hits the ground running is almost entirely accurate, since every character falls out of the sky in the first 4 minutes, and after dusting themselves off, begin shooting at things and doing a fuckload of running. I don't think I've ever seen a movie just start like this before, fulfilling it's genre and franchise requirements before most people have set their phones to vibrate or made it back to their seats with their popcorn. It's almost cool. More action films should eschew expository buildup and try to swim the channel with one big gulp of air like this. However, I quickly realized that the economy of Predators opening is really just laziness. Producer/writer Robert Rodriguez is merely hedging his bets that if you paid to watch Predators-plural, well then you've likely already seen Predator-singular and therefore all his world-building has already been done for him by a much better director (John McTiernan). From the whiplash excitement of the opening, the rest of the film seems content to nonsensically race from one fan-service beat to the next until the whole thing begins to resemble a sweded youtube homage with a $40 million dollar budget. I was actually insulted throughout, considering I watched it under the perhaps delusional pretense that it was made solely for me. They thought this is what I wanted? Predators digests every individual ingredient that made the original film cool and then regurgitates them one by one, unapologetically serving them back to you with a smile and a wink. It's like a Greatest Hits album put out around Christmas time by a band that really doesn't have enough hits to justify a whole CD. The whole thing just reeks of cashing-in.

If there is one interesting thing about Predators (besides personally, how it made me feel really old and also showed me why it's finally time to let go of my childhood for FUCKSAKES) is what its Action Hero casting tells us about the difference between 2010 and 1987. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the hero of Predator, while Adrien Brody is the hero of Predators. Hold on, maybe that statement wasn't impactful enough, so let's do a visual comparison.

Action Hero - 1987

Action Hero - 2010

I think this clearly speaks to the Wussification of our culture and how boys no longer have clear representations of masculinity to aspire to. Gone are the Clint Eastwood's and Charles Bronson's. The Lee Marvin's and Steve McQueen's. Hell, even the Jean Claude Van Damme's and Steven Seagal's. In 2010, Adrien fucking Brody seemed an appropriate surrogate for Arnold fucking Schwarzenegger. Jesus. What happened?